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As an industry we have been talking about and around Addressable TV for way too many years and, in my opinion, the time has come to make some hard decisions.

At a conference in Berlin recently, Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, essentially gave traditional TV two decades to live. I secretly hope it does have that long, but I don’t really think so. I think he’s playing us – playing us so that we all might be lulled into thinking that there is more time left to fix this then there really is.

Yes, I said “fix.” Why fix? Because the TV business model is broken. And we all know it.

Why should we fix it? For starters, from a marketing point of view, TV is too damn good to just let it atrophy. Second, if we don’t fix it, it will just continue to whimper. Thirdly – and this is probably the most important reason – marketers need it. Consider this: advertisers in Canada have a 60-plus year investment in TV as an advertising medium. It is one of the most – if not the most – powerful advertising platforms ever invented. Frankly, we don’t want to see it die.

“There is one very big obstacle still standing in the way of marketers shifting large amounts of ad spend to online from TV. They don’t trust it.”

We all learned this past year that digital ad spend in Canada exceeded TV ad spend for the first time. Online used to promise advertisers a potent mix of interactivity, engagement, targetability and measurability. To be sure, dollars are flowing to online – just ask any newspaper how ad revenues have been for the last decade. And though cracks are starting to show, as a medium, TV continues to attract about $3.4 billion of ad spend each year in Canada (a strong showing).

But why is that? Think of it, although online attracts nearly $3.5 billion worth of ad spend a year, only roughly $140 million of that is directed toward online video. Video to video is the more direct and legitimate comparison, in my opinion. And there is a huge gap between $3.5 billion and $140 million.

But there is also one very big obstacle still standing in the way of marketers shifting large amounts of ad spend to online from TV. They don’t trust it.

The talk of the online town these days is all about click fraud, bots, malware, domain spoofing, viewability, verification, transparency, and so on. A U.S. study projects that 23% of online video ads are really bots, and if we don’t get a handle on this, advertisers will spend $6.3 billion next year on fraudulent online buys. A similar Google study concluded that 56% of display ad impressions online never appear to viewers. More than anything else, it is this situation that is holding back the flow of dollars out of TV and into digital.

So what does this all mean for us? We still have time to fix this.

And I for one think that Addressable TV and Programmatic TV have a large role to play. Addressable TV holds great promise for advertisers, sharpening the targeting that can be achieved and cutting down on waste. Spot optimization, specific audience aggregations, geographic and demographic splits – all of it is ready to go, as most of you already know. Addressable TV can help broadcasters maximize revenue while helping advertisers maximize targeting, all of it efficiently measureable too. And programmatic TV will help put TV video on a more comparable basis with online video, allowing it to better compete. This is a new TV model that is emerging, not a medium that is fading.

If we’re lucky, marketers may be able to look forward to many more successful years with this late, and quite possibly once again, great, new advertising medium called television. But we really need to get on with it.

Bob Reaume is former VP, Policy and Research for the ACA. He retired in June, after a combined 22 years representing Canadian marketers before government, regulatory bodies and industry associations.